The aim of this paper is to approach the limits of the paternal punishment in the context of Ancien Régime. In this paper I examine two questions: how the Roman law was the basis for elaborating the concept of moderation for children's physical punishment? And how the control of prison disciplinary systems is the result of the royal political monopoly of punishment? I start with the idea that legal concepts and categories of Roman law, especially that of the Lower Empire, served for a jurists, at first as the foundation for exercising the paternal punishment, but subsequently, due to political implications, and transformations of an anthropological order, Roman law was re-interpreted and adapted to a new disciplinary paradigm. The result of this study is that the limits of paternal punishment represent the process of social control conducted by the State, and secondly, the remnant of a disciplinary mentality inherited from the Roman-Christian conceptions.
Law mentality; social control; disciplinary power; paternal power